engraven, in deep and legible characters, on all the works of nature and of art with which we are familiar. Winter strips the earth of her rich dress of many colours, and the trees of their beautiful foliage. Where the scene teemed with life, and was decked with verdure, a field of desolation rises to the view. For many months a great part of the globe presents little else than a widely extended sepulchre, enclosing in her gloomy caverns the spoils of summer and the wreck of autumn. Those gaudy insects which expand their wings," and flutter in the beams of a noon-tide sun, gathering sweets from every leaf and every flower, having gaily spent the period of their short existence, construct for themselves a shell, in which they lie entombed, without the least trace of life, or promise of future resurrection. Time wears away the monumental brass, and crumbles the lofty pyramid into dust. "And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man." The seasons roll round; day merges into night, and the cheerful and luxuriant months of spring and summer are succeeded by the gloom and desolation of winter. The sun rises and sets; and the stars perform their nightly courses, and then give place to the dawn of morn. In the page of pro

phecy we are led to anticipate a period when the very "heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up." And can we see the changes which are taking place around us, and not anticipate our own dissolution? Can we stand on moving sands, and find the foundation of all our earthly hopes give way, and yet imagine that we shall escape the common wreck of nature? "Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away."

We are not left, however, to deduce the fact of our mortality from analogy, but have the positive testimony of divine revelation. It was the sentence pronounced upon Adam, and, through him, on all his posterity: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." "Who is he that liveth, and shall not see death; shall he free his soul from the power of the grave?" "It is appointed unto all men once to die.” For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost,

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and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up; so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." The brief and simple annals of those who lived under the patriarchal and and jewish economies are generally concluded by the emphatic expression, "he died." Such is the end of all men, and the living ought to lay it to heart.

Besides these testimonies of our mortality, which are direct and positive, the Scriptures generally compare human life to objects which are the most frail and perishing, or the most vain and fleeting. It is a blade of grass, a flower, a leaf; which are subject to innumerable casualties, and liable, every moment, to be blighted and destroyed. If the grass escapes the tooth of those useful animals by which our labour is diminished, or our lives sustained, it either falls beneath the mower's hand, or is scorched and consumed by the beams of a meridian sun. Our green fields soon lose the fresh and beautiful hue on which the eye delights to repose, and are turned into a brown and fruitless desert. Still more transient is the flower, which perfumes and ornaments the wilds of nature, or the garden of art. We walk abroad, and are delighted and regaled with the beauty and fragrance of these inimitable produc

tions of the skill and goodness of the Almighty. And yet, when we examine their nice formation, the slender stem by which they are supported, the extreme delicacy of their fibres, and the manner in which they receive their nourishment t; and when we reflect on the countless accidents to which they are exposed; we feel sensible that they are produced only to adorn our plantation, and gratify our senses, for a season. In a few days, these exquisite specimens of infinite contrivance, droop, and wither, and die. The leaf is yet more frail than the flower. It is more liable to be broken off from its parent stock by the winds of heaven, and to be trampled in the dust by the foot of the careless passenger. Thus frail and perishable, in his best estate, is man! "We all do fade as the leaf, and our iniquities like the wind do carry us away." "The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass."*

* I cannot refrain from transcribing the following beautiful passage, from the inimitable writings of Bishop JEREMY TAYLOR, as illustrative of the observations which have just been made. In reading this celebrated author, one cannot but regret that while his compositions possess great strength and beauty, his statements of the great essentials of Christian

doctrine are frequently very defective. "It is a mighty

Human life is also compared to a summer's flood, which, as it is not fed by living springs, but is produced only by sudden and heavy falls of rain, soon spends itself, or mingles with the ocean to a cloud, which is quickly borne by the winds from one end of heaven to the other: to a shadow, which is an imperfect image of the substance, and so evanescent and fleeting as scarcely to be visible many moments together: to a vapour, which appeareth for a little while, and

change that is made by the death of every person; and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightliness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigourousness and strong flexure of the joints of five and twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror, of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness, and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonour, and our beauty so changed that our acquaintance quickly know us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who six hours ago tended upon us, either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot, without some regret, stay in the room alone where the body lies, stripped of its life and honour."